Packages of the week: Scientist ports

No matter how carefully you are testing a refactoring, it’s hard to be 100% sure your changes will work against real data and workloads until you put them in production.Scientist is a very neat Ruby library built by GitHub that makes it possible to deploy refactored code alongside existing logic for the same task, run both, then log and compare the results. This reduces the risk of deploying new code, because the old code is still running, and you can decide exactly what to do if results are inconsistent. You also gather real-world production data about the new code without the risk of fully deploying it.

There are at least two ports of Scientist for .NET that are being worked on at the moment. The first is a semi-official project that Phil Haack from GitHub is working on: Scientist.NET. The second seems a litle more complete at this point in time: Dave Zych’s Schience.

Both are still very early, but they are definitely projects to watch, and, why not, contribute to.

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